Cuban's comments are refreshingly honest

When Dumb and Dumber opened their mouths and stunning ignorance about race and "the Negro" came tumbling out, it was easy for us to condemn these mental midgets and their overt bigotry.

NBA team owner Donald Sterling, who viewed his athletes as chattel, insists that he's not a racist. Cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, who famously began his racist rant with the promising intro, "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," claims he's guilty only of using politically incorrect language.

"If I say Negro or black boy or slave, if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be (offended), then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet," said Bundy, who, remarkably, kept right on talking days after opining that blacks might have been better off under slavery. "We need to get over this prejudice stuff."

Yes, this prejudice stuff is troubling indeed, but it's made simpler when people like Sterling and Bundy reveal their bigotry in such easy-to-grasp language. When someone suggests that picking cotton promoted Negro family values, it's easy to repudiate such offensive remarks and feel better about ourselves for not feeling that way.

But now comes Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the outspoken billionaire, who has suddenly made the hard conversation about race that much harder.

It's the uncomfortable cross-the-other-side-of-the-street question, and it's not new, but Cuban put it out there just as we're wiping our hands of Sterling.

"We're all prejudiced in one way or another," Cuban said in a taped interview Wednesday. "If I see a black kid in a hoodie, and it's late at night, I'll move to the other side of the street. If I see a white guy with a shaved head and tattoos, I'll move back to the other side of the street…While we all have our prejudices and bigotries, we have to learn that it's an issue that we have to control, that it's part of my responsibility as an entrepreneur to try to solve it, not just to kick the problem down the road."

The next day, Cuban tweeted a sincere apology to the family of Trayvon Martin for the hoodie reference, saying he should have used a different example. But he added that he stood by the substance of his comments.

Now, Cuban is getting backlash for publicly admitting how many people privately feel. "Mark Cuban says he's scared of black kids in hoodies," reads a critical headline in the Dallas Observer, while some pundits are denouncing him as a racist.

But here's what I admire about Cuban's remarks. They're refreshingly brave and honest, brutally so, and he seems engaged in genuine self-evaluation. He's not a phony feigning the impossible standard of the self-righteous — that he doesn't "see" color. And after receiving so much heat, he hasn't backpedaled or claimed he was taken out of context.

There's a world of difference between a man struggling to confront and deal with his prejudices and an overt racist who insists he has none. One man is human and flawed; the other is simply a fraud. One man invites a candid, productive dialogue; the other promotes racial hatred.

When asked how to keep bigotry out of the NBA, Cuban said, "I'm the one guy who says, 'Don't force stupid people to be quiet.' I want to know who the morons are."

It's instructive to know who the morons are, because racism flourishes out of sight and in shadows, when it's ignored, denied or couched in cowardly platitudes. If I'm picking a side of the street, I'd rather walk with the people honest enough to recognize their imperfections. It won't erase bigotry, but at least it's a start.